Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that “full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”

Once computers are as intelligent as humans – a moment that tech experts refer to a “singularity” – there is likely there will be an “intelligence explosion” which sees the machines reach super-intelligence in a scarily short space of time.

To illustrate the threat to our species, Bostrom gave the chilling example of a machine that’s built to make paperclips.

If this machine is superintelligent, it may decide that humans are standing in the way of its paperclip-building drive and kill us all to enhance its own productivity.